Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Lose taste, lose weight
By Zosimo T. Literatus, R.M.T.
Breakthroughs
“A baseball swing,” Reggie Jackson said, “is a very finely tuned instrument. It is repetition and more repetition, then a little more after that.”
That’s true with skills; but with food, repeatedly eating sweets can reach a point when even sweets take on an unpleasant taste.
In dietary science, this phenomenon is called “negative alliesthesia,” the development of disgust for pleasant tastes upon repeated tasting.
In a recent study, Patrick Frankham, Caroline Gosselin and Michel Cabanac found that negative alliesthesia can bring weight loss in three months even with increased caloric intake.
Frankham, Gosselin and Cabanac are professors of Medicine and are members of the Interdisciplinary Group on Obesity Research at the Laval University (Quebec, Canada).
Initially in the study, obese participants repeatedly ingested sweet stimuli—a choice of Cantin caramels (7 g.) or Ensure vanilla (7 ml)— every three minutes until they felt displeasure and decided to end the session. Taste pleasures were measured 15 seconds after the first ingestion and after reaching negative alliesthesia. The same procedure was followed three months later, after a weight loss program that is popular in Canada.
Up to eight weeks, dietary energy intake was from 1400-2000 calories per day or kcal/day (composed of 50 percent carbohydrate; 25 percent protein; and 25 percent lipid). After eight weeks, caloric intake was upped by 50 kcal/week to reach 1800-2400 kcal/day (50 percent carbohydrate; 22 percent protein; 27 percent lipid).
Results, published in BMC Public Health (October 2005), showed that the diet lowered the average body mass index by 1.9 kg/sq. m. The onset of negative alliesthesia also dropped by nine minutes. No difference in the maximum and minimum levels of satisfaction strength was observed. Despite increasing the caloric intake in three months, weight loss without any loss of taste strength was still observed.
“The accelerated onset of negative alliesthesia observed in our obese participants after weight loss,” Frankham noted, “is suggestive of a lowered body weight set-point.” Certain factors, however, may have contributed to the result such as mild energetic restriction, lowered palatability, and diet composition.
This brings us to the concept of negation. “The fundamental law of life,” wrote Henri-Louis Bergson in his book Laughter, “is the complete negation of repetition.” The greatest adventures of life remain in those things we happily could not expect, much less subject to reproducibility. (For comments and suggestions, send your e-mail to ztliteratus6046@lycos.com or text to 0927-979-3519.)
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (February 21, 2007 issue)
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